New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd does not
like Twitter. You are probably already aware of this fact. They
have probably already tweeted the fuck out of it over in the
Twitterverse. The jokes, as they say, write themselves, even at a
maximum of 140 characters.

But so what? I mean, why should Maureen Dowd have to like
Twitter? Maureen Dowd is a columnist at
the New York Times, and given how long they let William
Safire ramble about on that page, it’s pretty clear that it’s a
tenure situation. Twenty years from now Dowd will still be making
the same superficial observations about significant political and
cultural events, only this time she’ll be working in references to
her nursing home and the indignities of being offered senior movie
tickets. She’s a Pulitzer Prize winner with a lifetime sinecure on
the op-ed page of the world’s most important paper (N.B.: This
whole train of thought assumes that there will still be a
Times twenty years from now, so let’s just pretend that
there will.); there is absolutely no reason for her to be tapping
out “AT AMAZING SALE AT CUSP W/ @WIESELTIER” in her spare moments.
She’s already built her brand.

And that’s exactly the point. Remember how when blogging started
to get attention the whole gang of print journalists would snort
derisively about how it wasn’t “really writing”? And then, a couple
of years later, when their papers were dying off and ownership was
so desperate for anything to staunch the flow of red ink that it
forced them all to start blogging, and they were like, “Holy shit,
blogging is hard!” Well, there was a certain protected class
of columnists and reporters who, because they were so established,
were not made to sully themselves by coding HTML and searching for
pooping dog videos. You don’t make a Maureen Dowd blog,
particularly when Jennifer 8. Lee will do it five hundred times a
day and happily twitpimp the results.

So don’t worry if Maureen Dowd doesn’t like Twitter; it’s not
for her. There are plenty of other journalists who
desperately need it (and some who definitely need to be
weaned from it-David Carr, you are FILLING UP MY DASHBOARD,
YOU HAVE TO CHILL). Let the Dowds bury their Dowds; the rest of us
are stuck slapping up the minutiae out of fear that we will
otherwise become invisible. Which is, of course, the worst thing of
all.